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Thursday, March 04, 2010

I have blogged before about a suit
brought by "Vision Media Television," against the consumer-complaint website 800Notes.com, for
allowing the posting of messages that criticize Vision Media's misleading
telemarketing claims. The messages reported that Vision Media cold-calls non-profit organizations with an offer to include them in a documentary series for "public television" hosted by Hugh Downs, using that line as hook to sign them up to pay about $25,000 to make a video spot that will be run as paid advertising on commercial television. Readers of this blog will recall that Vision Media’s first
response to my post about our summary-judgment motion was to seek
a gag order.

We recently discovered, and have pointed out in our latest filing in the case, that Vision Media is just one of a series of different names used in a
long-standing pattern of similar marketing claims. Jeff Cronin of the Center
for Science in the Public Interest has stepped forward with an account
of a disturbingly similar series of solicitations he has received
for CSPI to get itself time on “public television.” The calls have come from companies with different names over time, including WJMK, United Media, Vision Media and Great
America HD, and have claimed association with different news broadcasting
personalities, but all are located at the same address and use the same
marketing materials and phone numbers. According to Cronin’s affidavit,
the groups change their name (and the broadcast personality) when the
adverse publicity gets too great, and the newest version of the operation — Great America HD
— has just begun its solicitations, perhaps responding to the fact that
the public is onto "Vision Media TV."

According to Cronin, well-known broadcasters such as Walter
Cronkite, Aaron
Brown, Morley
Safer, and Mike
Douglas are among the names that this coterie of companies have
used to solicit business. Cronkite and Douglas filed suit over being
misled; it remains to be seen how Hugh Downs, the name these companies
are currently bandying about in their marketing calls, will react.

Cronin
explains that given the amount of experience he has in communications,
he easily saw through the marketing claims, but he expresses concern
that smaller non-profits might easily be taken in. He points to an admission on the
web site of the newest version of the company that, when people are
told that the company has a relationship with “public television,” they
will likely assume that they have being promised exposure on PBS and its
affiliates. Non-profits receiving calls from companies with any of
these names — or any new names that may be adopted — should take Cronin's analysis into account and proceed with care.

In a brief and affidavit addressed to this blog post Vision Media admits that Great America HD is "a product" of Vision Media, and insists that this fact is clearly disclosed - in the contract (I could not find Vision Media's name on the Great America HD web site). It claims, however, that it is separate from WJMK and United Media, and offers a variety of explanations for the shared address, phone numbers and personnel cited in Jeff Cronin's affidavit. The affidavit acknowledges it uses a different mailing address "down the street since the building we are in has a checkered past and the address has been ruined for all of the tenants affiliated with the television production industry because of WJMK's misconduct." Interesting, though, that it seems to have the same telemarketing M.O. as WJMK and that it uses identical written materials; no explanation is given for those similarities.

Vision Media also says that it gives its programming to a distributor which, in turn, “sends it out” to all 349 public television station. But although it proudly presents listings of the times when it has bought time on various commercial stations for its infomercials, it does not even claim that any of the programs are ever aired on public television stations. There is no indication that Vision Media shares this detail in its telemarketing calls.

Myself, I get two or three mailings a week from Capital One, and they all end up in the same circular file, unopened.